


And Maybe You Could (Stay For A While)

by ShadowsLament



Category: Preacher (TV)
Genre: M/M, Season/Series 01, requited feelings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:49:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22604239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowsLament/pseuds/ShadowsLament
Summary: A series of scenes set primarily in the midday and late night pauses of the first season. Some scenarios may repeat (the initial realization of feelings, for instance, the writing of which I am extremely fond), while some may wind back to or reference one that came before.The first scene is tangled around temptation…“A taste.” More than one morning had found Jesse pinned to his mattress by a single stripped down thought, covered in the kind of sweat called forth by an image of tattoos spilled across his rumpled sheets, a desert-pale stretch of skin bared to his blunt teeth. “That all you want?”
Relationships: Proinsias Cassidy/Jesse Custer
Comments: 1
Kudos: 18





	And Maybe You Could (Stay For A While)

**Author's Note:**

> I hope it's okay to show up this late to the party. It's a blessing/curse wading in now, after the show has concluded, but the timing hardly matters when these boys refuse to stray far from my thoughts.

“Quinces.” Cassidy’s gaze, turned up to one sun-dazzled stained glass window, was circled in gunmetal and tinted ruby-red. He slid those sunglasses of his down the crooked blade of his nose, peered at Jesse over the frames. “You’ve not had a taste o’ one, have you, Padre?”

From the end of the aisle, right hip hitched against a pew, Jesse stopped squinting, quit trying to figure out just how many rinds—and from which flavor of citrus they were stripped—Cassidy had used for the makeshift rug he sat on. He shook his head, scratched at the corner of a smile. “Can’t say as I have.”

“Well, we won’t be makin’ no bones about it. Won’t be makin’ no excuses for it, neither.”

“‘Course not,” Jesse agreed easily. Inhalin’ air so bright and fresh he half-believed there were juice-slick seeds stuck behind his molars, he unhurriedly cut down the distance between them, step by echoing step. “Did you eat all those?”

“All what now? Last thing I put in this mouth o’ mine, you were there to see it, handed some over on your own spoon.” 

Cassidy pulled an intact piece of fruit from behind his back. The thing was morning-golden, misshapen. He tossed it up, the straight-shot trajectory disrupting a lazy stream of dust motes, and when it smacked down on his palm, appeared to consider its weight. 

“This here’s your apple, Jesse. The itty bitty bomb planted in some garden, the grenade thrown into that other place—the one with the lady and a crap ton o’ ships and fuckin’ gods disguised as oxen, smelly bastards, they are, and—Wait, never fucking mind that, let’s get back to this bein’ your forbidden fruit.” Cass pinched the quince’s long, leafless stem. Shrugged. “Maybe it was. Might’ve been. Stories conflict, an’ I was only half-listenin’ at best. But what I’m sayin’ is it’s a nasty bit of business, this thing here.”

Jesse took a seat on a pew at the front. He crossed his legs, passed a glance over Cassidy’s bent knee, the ink on skin Jesse could see through a shredded hole, a gap in the garden hedge painted all over the denim. His friend was reclined back, braced on a palm pressin’ flat a bunch of loosely woven rinds, and for a moment Jesse considered testing it, the idea that if he took up that hand like an offering bowl he would taste a trace of salt in the sweet residue of a blood orange.

“How’s that?”

For what seemed a drawn out spell of seconds, Cassidy was quiet. Into the silence he tossed his sunglasses; stretched out the horizon-line length of his legs. He took a thumbnail to the quince and scored a stripe into its furred skin. Then, then his stare lowered from Jesse’s eyes to his mouth—wholly visible without a cigarette butt or bottle clingin’ to it—before it slowly, slowly, lifted back up again.

“The way you’re lookin’ at me, Padre.” Cassidy pushed off that palm, leaned slightly forward. “What it is you’re seein’, does it register here,” he said and punctuated the question with a point blank tap to his forehead. “Or here,” he murmured, with a fingertip pressed to his chest, left side. “Here?” he asked, while the hand Jesse had imagined himself sipping from rode the smooth plane of Cass’ stomach, curved to cup his cock through layered cloth. Cass squeezed—Jesse fixed hard on his friend’s knuckles, the sudden tension briefly erasing the lines cut across them—before lettin’ go. “Is it even me you’re seein’, Jess?”

“You want me to answer,” Jesse said, after he’d managed a rough swallow, “you’ve got to first ask a question I can understand.”

Untied, tongue-wagging boots displaced a dozen rinds as Cass levered up from the floor. He peeled off a cardigan the color of clementines, his arms covered by two other shirts besides, and flung the poorly knit sweater in the general direction of a Bible-bearing pew. “D’you want to know what I see,” he asked, “whenever I’ve so much as a peek at you?”

With Cass less than an arm’s span away, Jesse’s gaze skimmed the silver of a dainty belt buckle, climbed the ladder of mismatched buttons on an acidic yellow shirt until he came to another, different kind of apple, a spotty shadow of stubble, the curl of Cass’ lips. “Go on,” Jesse said, soft and low, “tell me.”

Their mouths were suddenly on a level, inches apart. Cass’ breath was cool and lime-tart. It was late nights with two forks and a single plate between them, crumbled bits of crust on the table like a trail leading from one to the other. It was prayer-quiet, each exhalation edged by a lick of smoke.

“Booted from the garden before you were born, and sure I was, so you’ll have to imagine my fuckin’ surprise when I walked into some random, middle o’ nowhere bar and thought for a moment the walls were trees of the vivid green and leafy variety. Slightly stubby, though, I’ll be granting you that. Same as the tables, mate, ‘cause those were actually a bunch o’ fuckin’ bushes. And don’t be thinkin’ I mean the kind cut into fuckin’ unnatural shapes, no, that’d be a different—“

“Cass.” His tone softened by fingerprints of fondness imprinted on the days, weeks, Cass had been around, Jesse asked, “You goin’ somewhere in particular with this?”

“Christ’s sake, man, here I am, takin’ a nice little leisurely stroll through an hallucinatory paradise, and you there tryin’ to rush me.” Cass clicked his tongue, shaking his head, but his pupils were dark, swollen things in the moss beds of his irises. “You’ll imagine my fuckin’ surprise, all right, when I turned my head and saw in the center of that unlikely place a sight far more temptin’ than any breed of fruit. A man who made me right fuckin’ glad I’d been kicked out o’ that first garden, if only for the chance, the slightest possibility, that I might be able to have a taste of him, get myself thrown out o’ another.”

“A taste.” More than one morning had found Jesse pinned to his mattress by a single stripped down thought, covered in the kind of sweat called forth by an image of tattoos spilled across his rumpled sheets, a desert-pale stretch of skin bared to his blunt teeth. “That all you want?”

“I want to know you, Jess. In every way, in all things.” Cass paused, his brow creased. “Please tell me we opened to the same printed page a moment ago, Padre. ‘Cause I can’t hardly be makin’ this any clearer, short o’ namin’ you my forbidden fruit. There wasn’t another man in that bar that night, not that I fuckin’ saw least—“

Jesse got a hand on Cass’ nape. “It’s always one or two too many sentences with you, isn’t it.” He may not ever be able to say how he managed it with Cass crowded in so close, how exactly it was he got both shoulder blades down on the pew’s scratched-to-shit bench and his boot heels up on it, his legs parted just enough to let in a set of lean hips. “Come on now.”

“Must’ve misunderstood the definition o’ forbidden, then. All this time,” Cass muttered—to himself, Jesse suspected—and let his wide-open stare stray from Jesse’s face to the cant of his hips. “Now, to be certain, when you say come, I take it you’re meanin’ in the simple sense of—“

“Is any goddamned thing simple where you’re concerned, Cassidy?” Because there was nothin’ simple about the water-like ripple of one inked hand on Jesse’s hip, or the undeniable weight of Cass slotting into place between Jesse’s thighs, the way every intimate point of contact made a complication of breathing. Reaching up, hooking a finger in the cotton collar of Cass’ t-shirt, Jesse tugged. “You wanna stay just like this or—“

“Oh, well now, I got epochs to spare. Would gladly spend more than a few of ‘em starin’ down at this view.” Cass’ smile skewed lopsided as his head angled, lowered. His next exhale was a strong, quick pulse at Jesse’s throat. “You don’t smell of this world, Jess.”

There was no reason to believe the maelstrom caged by Jesse’s ribs was anything like an actual whirlpool or cyclone, that it might smell like seaweed on a shoal or air suffocating on debris, on dust and dirt. Point of fact, Jesse hadn’t ever considered it might smell like anything at all, never mind that it might change the balance of his own scent. Overpower the nicotine, drown out the alcohol.

“All things considered,” he said with a one-sided grin, “you think it might be brimstone?”

“In my time, Jess, I’ve had plenty o’ whiffs of sulfur.” Cass’ lips laid down a line of bare pressure on Jesse’s jugular. Worked their way back up, soft and slow, with kisses like sugar spilled across the counter. “It’s fuckin’ not that.”

Cassidy rocked his hips, and Jesse’s eyes shut of their own damn accord. The hiss—the low hum—that slight friction sparked, he couldn’t place the voice right then, didn’t know if it was his own or Cass’, but the sound—Christ, it lit up every nerve ending.

“Do that again,” he murmured, “harder this time.”

Eyes shuttered, teeth tight on his lower lip, Cass smoothed a hand down from Jesse’s knee to his ass. Slid it beneath, palming the curve. He mouthed words foreign in shape, pressed them against Jesse’s forehead, his jaw, while fingers skinned in citrus scents kneaded, dug into black denim.

Having withdrawn, eased back, Cass rocked down. Harder. Grinding into the firm clutch of Jesse’s thighs, he breathed, “Fuck me,” and Jesse’s heartbeat hitched, started up again like an urgent call to worship.

“I intend to.” Jesse shoved up layers of worn-thin cloth to find skin, to sink a hand into the shallow of Cass’ spine. “But not here, not now.” He rolled his hips up, up to meet Cass’, and knew without a doubt the moan stretching up to the church’s spire was half him, half Cassidy. “That taste you wanted, you gonna take it anytime soon?”

“Oh, I’ll be takin’ it. Fear not, Padre, I’ll—“

Jesse huffed a laugh, and the lazy undulations of Cass’ hips stuttered to an odd stop, some kind of bright and delighted thing slanting across the eyes holding Jesse’s. 

“What?”

Cass smiled slightly and shook his head, dipped down. 

Time went unaccounted for as their lips clung, slick and sensitive skin on skin, neither one of them in a rush to change the angle. The depth. More than a kiss, it felt like communion.

Jesse hummed, wound the warmth of Cass’ shirts around his fingers. Clenched the material in his hand. “Kiss me, Cassidy,” the words came out soft as a shiver, a whisper licking the lips pressed to his, “really kiss me.”

Cass murmured, “Anythin’ I can give you, Jess, anythin’,” before he obliged, those quick and clever lips of his parting, tongue stroking out like a question, a demand to be let in, to let him have his taste, finally.

Rising to meet the man above him, to return the heat and pressure in kind, every inhale Jesse managed to take was one more step into a grove or garden flush with the fruit Cass had gathered. With his eyes closed, Jesse would swear he saw striated sunlight on leaves as green as Cass’ eyes, on the shining shades of supple skin well within his reach. 

A moan like a breath passed between their mouths. 

Jesse swallowed the sound, barely suppressing the urge to peel off the layers of shirts he still held, to get his fingernails beneath the fastened waistband and scrape Cass’ stolen pants down his legs, toss them to the floor with the rest of the rinds.

Their hips rose and retreated, ebbed and rushed back, set an aching, unrelenting rhythm. 

It took time, effort, but Jesse found his voice trembling and low in his throat. “Shouldn’t feel this good.”

“And why the fuck not?” Cass smeared a kiss over Jesse’s temple, the faint sweat there puttin’ a sheen on his kiss-wrecked lips. “Didn’t I know it’d be—“

“Hello?” The tone was tentative, feminine. Not entirely familiar. “Preacher?”

Both of them had stilled at the first syllable, but it was Cass who quietly bit out, “Shite, fuck, not now,” and turned a near anguished glance down to Jesse. “We stop this here, I won’t get another—“

“You will.” Jesse drifted folded knuckles along the descending line of Cass’ face, scuffed skin catching on stubble. He molded that hand to the curve of Cass’ neck, urged him closer, kissed him quick. “That page you mentioned before, I was on it a while ago, with you.”

“Prea—“

“Your goddamned horses can wait another minute,” Cass snapped, tension holding him taut over Jesse, the stare he aimed at the pew’s backrest flint-hard, “can they fuckin’ not.” 

“This ain’t a stable,” the girl said, “and I ain’t got all day.”

“Right,” Jesse sighed. “Cass, I’m gonna need you to get up.”

“I was.” Cass shifted, slithered down Jesse’s body until he sat up on both knees at Jesse’s feet. Gesturing towards the paint-splattered denim strapping down the hard length of his cock, he said, “Still fuckin’ am, for Jesus’ sake, in spite o’ this ill-timed interruption, this gross abuse of your saintly services.” With eyes darkened by frustrated hunger, Cass watched Jesse sit up, watched as he situated his collar and resettled his rolled shirt cuffs. As he adjusted the lean of his own cock inside boxer briefs, too-tight jeans. “Honestly, does she not know it’s too late to come callin’?”

“Last time I checked, it was the middle of the afternoon.”

“My point exactly, Padre.” Cass pointed up at a sunlit stained glass widow, shuddered. “Only God-fearing individuals would be out and about at this hour.”

“I suppose,” Jesse said, and stood, “that explains why she’s here.”

As Jesse moved to meet her where she seemed to determined to stay, the girl openly stared. At his face, streaked with lingering heat. At skin that had to’ve been marked with the impression of Cass’ mouth. Jesse was well aware of the wrinkles cutting across his shirt, of the one button inexplicably undone. And his hair, he figured it was likely a mess. Though his fingertips itched to find out, Jesse wasn’t about to sort out a single strand.

“What can I do for you,” he sifted through hazy memories, “Abigail.”

“Well,” she said, and launched into a story that spread itself out beneath a wide-reaching tree and beside a sloe-eyed boy, details sticky as apple juice spilling out until she concluded, “and now that we went and started this thing, whatever it is, Preacher, neither one of us wants to stop.” Abigail took an overdue breath, lifted a chin Jesse thought probably always tended towards defiant, and asked him, “Is that wrong? Is it unforgivable?”

Jesse cast a glance over his shoulder.

Bent to scoop up a handful of rinds, Cass tucked the strips and spirals into the basket he’d made of one shirt. Squinting at the quince, he wagged a finger at it, appeared to berate the thing before picking it up, taking a bite. His brow creased, his nose scrunched, Cass hastily spit out the fruit’s pale flesh. Down the aisle, his disgusted, “What the fuckin’ Christ is that all about,” rang out loud and clear.

Smiling, with laughter on his tongue, Jesse turned to Abigail. “It ain’t wrong,” he said. “Thing is, whatever you two have together, it could be exactly right.”

**Author's Note:**

> Titles borrowed respectively from "in the afternoon" and "Paradise" by Josef Salvat. To anyone reading this, thank you! Kudos/comments are always, always appreciated.


End file.
